Trevor Lawrence Jr.: Welcome back to another episode of The TrevBeats Show. If you know anything about West Coast hip-hop, or just top-tier, immaculate production in general, you already know who this is. He’s a Compton native, a pioneer of the West Coast sound, a multi-platinum-selling artist, and one of the most respected producers and engineers to ever touch a mixing board. From his classic debut Quik Is the Name to laying down tracks for legends like Tupac, Snoop, Sugar Free, AMG, Jay-Z, and more, his fingerprints are all over the soundtrack of our lives. Please welcome the one and only, the legendary, my brother — DJ Quik. DJ Quik: Trev, what up, my guy? Trevor: Yes, sir. How you doing, man? DJ Quik: I’m good, boss. I’m good. Trevor: Man, I’m super happy to have you with us today. I see you at work. That looks like a Duality for those who know. Stop playing. On this show, I love bringing on people who have really contributed to the game, and no one has done that more than you. I still think this conversation needs to happen more, so we’re going to have one today. I grew up listening to your music. We’re about the same age, but I grew up on your music before I knew you personally. Outside of everybody knowing you’re from Compton, I want to know about the journey before music really took off. Where did you get the bug from? DJ Quik: Man, I don’t know. Just growing up listening to music and watching Soul Train. Soul Train was my inspiration for everything. From the time I was three, four, five years old, seeing people dance to music and seeing my people — that was inspirational. Listening to Curtis Mayfield at a young age put a battery in my back. I was playing records as a kid. I think the first time I played a record, I was maybe one or two years old, and I didn’t scratch it. I naturally understood the mechanics of a turntable and how records made my family members feel. That’s where it came from. I wanted to play the right records and have everybody have a good time. Trevor: So that morphed into you creating them. DJ Quik: Yeah. Finding drum machines along the way. When I was about 10, I got ahold of a Boss drum machine — I think it was a 606. I was playing around with the 606, turntables, scratching, and programming beats. That was my teenage years. Going to school, being around people who liked the same music, watching the Run-D.M.C. era and how that changed our style of dress — it was like a school of fish back then. It seemed like everybody from every part of America, every Black person, moved in the same rhythm. Trevor: There was no East Coast or West Coast thing at that point? DJ Quik: Not really. I was on what they were on. But I was also proud of local groups. Obviously N.W.A., but even before that, people like T.O.T.T., Battle Ram, and local records that felt touchable. When they would say “Compton,” we all felt that. At that time, the streets were unnecessarily dangerous. Anybody could get it. Music kept me in the house. People gravitated toward me because I would build my own speakers, make my own sound system, and play records I liked. People started coming to me asking for cassettes of those records, and I would make ten bucks making mixtapes. That got me into recording. I had VU meters, and I was riding the meters, pause-mixing off the radio. I did everything a B-boy should do. My peers called me a B-boy, so I guess I was. Trevor: If you came up in that period, those are things most of us who became producers learned early. It was pause-button mixing before cutting waves and doing all the things people do now. We learned the old-fashioned way. Making beats is one thing, but you developed real acumen as an engineer. Not guessing, not luck — a real bona fide engineer. Where did you learn that skill? DJ Quik: Thank you, Trev. There are a couple names: Courtney Branch, Dr. B, and Tracy Kendrick. Being in the record pool gave me a heads-up on what records were coming out. They used to mix records, and there’s a process from real tape to master tape, to mastering, to pressing, and then getting test pressings back. That process always intrigued me. I wanted to know how to get the biggest, coolest-sounding vinyl. Sometimes you would buy vinyl and it would be quiet, and that didn’t make sense to me. I wanted to know how to get the most bang and the most impact. I learned from them. I learned from Mike Frankie, one of our local guys. There were engineers at studios in L.A. and Hollywood. George Murphy had a studio, and I used to learn from engineers there. They had a big console — I think it was a Trident board. I also worked with Richard “Dimples” Fields and LJ Reynolds from The Dramatics. Player Ham, from Penthouse Players Clique, was into four-track recorders and drum machines too, so we shared what we learned with each other. I would produce him, make beats on the SP-1200, record vocals on tracks two and three, then bounce everything to track four to clear up more tracks. Ping-pong recording, overdubbing, blending sounds, seeing what worked and what didn’t. Preamplifiers were part of it too — Neve, API, and how different preamps impart color to your sound. We wanted that color. We wanted things to sound bigger than they did straight out of the drum machine. Of course, there was trial and error. Going from studio to studio, seeing new boutique preamps — Demeter, Langevin, Pultec — plugging into them, turning knobs, and seeing what came out. It’s all about painting. Putting paint where it ain’t. Trevor: You also use a lot of live instruments. One thing people may or may not know is your use of live percussion. Even on a fully programmed track, it adds life. A shaker, cabasa, or percussion part can make everything sound more human. You utilized that early, and it became a staple. DJ Quik: You know who I got that from? Carl “Butch” Small. Butch was opening up all those tracks for Death Row. I asked him to play on one of my songs, and he played on “Dollars and Sense” and killed it. The percussion was amazing. There was a time when I couldn’t get him because he was locked up in the studio, and I couldn’t find another percussionist. So I went to West L.A. Music, went into the drum area, started picking out percussion, playing it in the store, imagining it on my productions. I went home, practiced, and started playing on my own records. Trevor: That became part of the L.A. sound. I can’t speak for every region, but in L.A., that became a staple. Rance and 1500 or Nothin’ play live. Terrace Martin uses live percussion. People who were around you took that influence. You were one of the early people bringing that to the forefront. Now, on the gear side, you came up when analog was the thing, and then everything started moving digital. You learned when it was still tape. From then to now, with how easy everything is, do you feel something has been lost? DJ Quik: It goes back to coloring your sound. People today like things clean, clinical, and clear. The color was the warmth. That’s what the tape machine imparted. It gave you second- and third-harmonic distortion. Harmonics turned up is what that is. It turns up the harmonies, and you feel them differently. When you take the tape machine away, a lot of records still sound like demos because they haven’t been committed to tape. When you commit to tape, it makes better vinyl. I’m reluctant to buy vinyl now, outside of something like Tyler, the Creator for my grandson, because I know most people aren’t using tape. It’s too expensive. But tape was the glue. It was the color. Everything now sounds pastel and earth tone to me. Tape was super colorful. There’s also a whole generation of engineers who don’t know how to get tones or use a tape machine. They’re missing two-thirds of their sound. As a DJ, I think there’s a playability factor for records that come from tape. You can play them over and over again, and they still feel good. I never get tired of listening to Chicago’s “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” on vinyl. It feels alive. It’s huge. That’s from tape. Records that go straight into Pro Tools, unless you color them yourself with second-harmonic distortion from Neve 1073s, transformer-based gear, FET-based gear, or tube-based colorization, can become one-tone. It’s harder to want to hear that over and over again. Our records lasted and still last. When I perform in concert, those records still sound good. Some of the later stuff I did in Pro Tools without tape doesn’t resonate as much in the concert arena as the big, heavy-bottom analog stuff. Trevor: That’s so true about harmonics and what happens physically with analog versus digital. People may not understand the science, but they feel something. Listen to Thriller on vinyl versus a digital version — it’s different. DJ Quik: Exactly. Digital came because it’s practical. Everybody can handle it. But tape is impractical. You have to store it properly, keep it under air conditioning, and maintain it. But tape captures energy better than anything else. Pro Tools records signals. Magnetic tape picks up the energy in the room too. It records vibrations from people. If you bump a CD player, it may not skip. If you bump a turntable, it reacts. Tape is tangible too. Vibrations affect us. On my first albums, we would throw parties around the tape machine while it was running, and when you listened back, you could feel the party. That’s the missing link. Trevor: For those who don’t know, two-inch tape is a reel that houses two-inch tape. Each reel had a cost. If tape gets too old, you may have to bake it so the particles don’t disintegrate. It’s completely different from a thumb drive or hard drive today. DJ Quik: This is what separates me from everybody else: I still record to tape. It’s the most expensive medium there is, but it does all the work for you. When people hear it, they don’t just hear what you did — they feel it. That’s a level of musical integrity a lot of people don’t want to take the journey toward. They want the easy way. I’ve worked with young engineers who are talented, and I love seeing growth, but they don’t understand the concept. I would challenge any of them to get a four-track, take what they’re doing in Pro Tools, print it to tape, and see how saturated and quiet they can get it before they give up and stay in plugins. Your plugin does a two-dimensional copy. There’s no front and back. There’s no depth. Mixing in the box is fine, and I love many engineers who do it, but that’s not my thing. Getting tones and transients out of a live console moves people. It moves me. If I can stay on a 24-track, I can get my whole idea down on 24 tracks. My most popular records, Quik Is the Name and Way 2 Fonky, were 24-track tape with sync and SMPTE to lock up overdubs. Trevor: For those who don’t know, SMPTE stands for Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. That’s how things used to be locked up. You would strike the tape with timecode, and anything reading SMPTE would follow that timecode. It was like a train on tracks. DJ Quik: People started taking two tape machines and flying hooks. One tape machine had the hook. Trevor: That was SMPTE offsets. Somebody had to calculate where to offset the tape machines by tempo and bars. DJ Quik: That was the best fidelity-wise because it was only one generation. Then samplers came, like the Akai S1000 and the Eventide H3000, and people started sampling hooks and flying them that way. Eventually, Pro Tools came, and you could cut, paste, and move everything. But that made artists, including me sometimes, lazy. You didn’t record the whole vocal all the way down. You got eight bars and pasted it wherever you wanted it instead of recording each chorus with its own character. Trevor: That’s what you feel on older records. The whole record is a journey. Each musician’s interpretation adds something. James Gadson told a story on this show about putting that bass drum in the break on “Dancing Machine.” He thought it was a mistake, and it became one of the hookiest parts of the record. Those things don’t happen when somebody says, “I just need eight bars,” and starts flying everything around. It becomes mechanical. While we’re here, we should touch on where things are now with AI. You’re a trendsetter and influence on track-making in general. What are your thoughts on AI, especially now that people who don’t know music are making music? DJ Quik: There are pros and cons. Like anything, too much of it is bad for you. It’s like soda or sugar. If it’s used the right way, it’s dope. If it’s used in conjunction with what you do creatively, it can be true to what we like and what we’re used to. But the cheating element — you can feel it. You can hear it. AI isn’t going to make you write a better song than Ashford & Simpson wrote at Motown in the ’60s. You’re not going to top what we’ve done lyrically with an AI record. You can gaslight people into thinking you’re a producer or composer by letting AI do everything for you, but anybody can do that. And it’s going to show because AI has a footprint. You can see it in AI videos. You can see where it’s fake, jittery, and artificial. Trevor: Warryn Campbell said something similar on the show. He said you can hear the limiter and mastering section on AI stuff because it all has the same kind of processing at the end. DJ Quik: It has a stain. A footprint. It’s not live at all. Trevor: What do you think about using AI creatively, but not as the master? For example, using it to spark an idea, realize an old demo, or hear something differently, then redoing it with real people or your own process. DJ Quik: I use AI. I use it for stems. I’ll take songs I like, and if I don’t have the 24-track, I’ll break them into stems and listen to them. I used to do that kind of thing around 2000. I showed Dre how I was pulling things apart. I took “Papa Don’t Take No Mess,” removed everything including James Brown’s voice, and just had the drums. Dre was like, “I don’t know how you’re doing that.” That was like early AI to me — bandpass filters, compression, expansion, gating. AI just took that concept and expanded it artificially. It seems like AI looks at where vocals usually sit, where drums sit, the frequencies, the amplitude, and the range, then carves everything out. Sometimes it doesn’t get it right because strings can resonate like vocals, so you’ll hear strings in the vocal stem. But for educational purposes, it works. Trevor: People have been trying to do that for a long time. Now in the DJ world, you can do stems live for any song. DJ Quik: Right on my turntable. It’s amazing. Those are incredible use cases. But sitting there trying to make a song from nothing with no music knowledge — that shouldn’t be permissible. Don’t try to get rich and famous without doing what we did to get there. Don’t try to start the marathon 100 yards from the finish line. Trevor: You were one of the first people in hip-hop to really be the person doing the voice and the production — almost like what Stevie Wonder was doing conceptually. We didn’t see that in hip-hop much before you. You mastered both sides. Is your approach different when you know something is for you versus when you’re producing for someone else? DJ Quik: Stevie Wonder is my favorite living artist, period. I would never put myself in the same pantheon as him. But I understand the concept. Stevie is always at Guitar Center with Ryan Mason, buying new gear, trying new MPCs and samplers. He still plays with the toys and even gives them away. He’s such a bad dude. For me, it was a means to an end. I wanted to get a record deal. From the time I was 18 until I got it, I worked with Player Ham, Tweed Cadillac, the Uzi Brothers, Battlecat, and local guys. I wanted to be with the L.A. Dream Team, Rodney O, Joe Cooley — those were my heroes. I get on keyboards, write parts, and save them if they’re cool and don’t sound like something I’ve heard before. I got that from Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. If they got a DX7, they would have someone change all the stock sounds. They didn’t want stock sounds, and neither did I. Anybody can use stock sounds. But if I dial in, turn the knobs, and play with the circuit, I can make something different. Kenneth Crouch taught me that too: don’t just play the keys, play the whole circuit. Put it in muscle memory. Record it and make something you want to hear twice. Some records now, as a DJ, I don’t want to hear twice. They’re records, but they’re missing something. I don’t know if it’s Pro Tools, the mastering, or a lack of saturation that makes it dance on your skin, but it’s hard to play them twice. I don’t want to be the hater, because I’m a DJ. I get paid to play records. But I play records that are proven to move people — Eazy-E, N.W.A., In Vogue, classic stuff. Some new records are only new because they were just released. They don’t feel fully cooked. It’s almost like microwave music versus home-cooked meals. Trevor: The reason people make music now feels different. Back in the day, people were trying to reflect the time, reflect places, and provide a backdrop of emotion. Now it feels like people are trying to cheat or influence algorithms. They’re trying to second-guess the algorithm, and that has nothing to do with why we used to do this. You can feel when a record falls flat because there’s no emotion behind it. Somebody on a laptop anonymously makes a record, sends it to 50 people, somebody cuts it, and they never meet. There’s no connection. But I do see a small resurgence among younger people — 15, 16, 17 years old — who are into going to shows, finding real artists, and hearing actual music made the old-fashioned way. DJ Quik: That gives me hope for the future. I didn’t know the kids were on it like that. Trevor: Now, you’ve been part of something a lot of people will never experience: being in the studio with Tupac. Especially during All Eyez on Me, producing and mixing. Is there a memory from those sessions that stands out about his work ethic? DJ Quik: I can speak to the fact that he was never in the room with me long, which means he was in the other seven studios, because I was in number eight. But when he came in, I had something ready. I would push play on the tape machine. He’d sit down with his pen and paper, roll a blunt, start writing, then say, “I got it,” and go in. I’ve seen Jay-Z work like that too. Same kind of work ethic. They don’t have time for nonsense. They’re archiving their lives and sharing it. Pac would go in, spit it, do the overdubs, then say, “Quik, put a hook here.” It was surreal to see somebody work that hard. After he got out of that situation in New York, I saw him get angrier and angrier. I never told anybody this, but some of the anger he would spit on the microphone unnerved me. It gave me chills. It was scary. So I would mix his vocals a little lower and let the music be loud. When you push him up, like on “Hit ’Em Up,” it’s scary. It affects my emotions. It feels like something is going to happen — like a train wreck. On All Eyez on Me, some of the vocals are a little lower because I wanted the music to take over. I didn’t want anything to happen to him. I knew Pac from Digital Underground, but the Pac who came to Death Row was a gangster. I liked the Black Panther side. I liked the “Humpty Dance” side. But that wasn’t the Pac I was around then. I was there to finish his album, and I did the best I could. Fast forward, and now it’s in the Grammy Hall of Fame. I’m very proud of that. I just wish we had more time. I wish Pac could have calmed down and gotten free. He was still out on bail, so he never really felt the freedom he had before that case. Something had been taken from him — that zest for living. You could see it. My thing was to help him have as much fun as he could. Smoke with him, drink with him, talk mess, tour with him. Pac was intense. The only other person like him to me is Treach. Powerful, intense, and intentional. It was like seeing one of the greatest of all time do it while he was doing it. And I’m a rapper too, but in that session, I changed hats. I became an engineer and documented. We had the SSL 4000 in there. I would put Nate Dogg’s vocals to my spec to get more air on the top. We made history. Trevor: Thank you for sharing that. I’ve seen how difficult it can be for someone to assimilate back into society after being locked up for a long time. You mentioned Digital Underground. I found out recently that although people associate them with Oakland, there’s also Philly history there. DJ Quik: That makes sense. Digital Underground sounded more commercial than a Bay Area record to me. Bay Area records were more underground until they blew up. Digital Underground reminded me more of X Clan than just a straight Bay Area record. Trevor: That’s one reason I do this podcast — so people can start putting the crumbs together. DJ Quik: Crumbs equal cake. Trevor: Exactly. We’ve been here long enough to see the evolution from different L.A. movements — World on Wheels, Compton dominating the L.A. sound, Long Beach, the Bay, jerking, all of it. Who are some new-generation artists or producers catching your ear right now? DJ Quik: Ty Dolla $ign is bad. Jay Worthy has his pulse on it. Meet the Whoops are talented. Problem is alumni now, so he isn’t new, but he’s still part of a younger generation that moves the needle. Mustard is one of my favorites right now because he mastered the art of simple 808 fun stuff. On the jazz side, you have Terrace Martin, Kamasi Washington, and those cats. That’s a whole other color. Trevor: I’ve noticed that now there seems to be more similarity between Southern California and Northern California music. Stuff that used to be more Bay Area is mixing more with what’s happening down here. DJ Quik: I rock with Larry June heavy. That’s modern-day West Coast yacht music. Rolls Royce music. That slow flow and mellowness in the music — that’s a good color. Trevor: I’ve told you this before, but I quote you in masterclasses. One of your album titles, Balance & Options, is such a powerful analogy for life. DJ Quik: Everything is about balance. When something is out of balance, you weigh your options to get it back balanced. It’s like autopilot on a plane. It’s always computing and counteracting. If the plane yaws, it brings it back without you seeing it happen. That’s why we fly so smoothly. If the pilot had to do all of that manually the whole time, it would feel like riding a jet ski. There’s also a spiritual element. Don’t let negativity take over your studio, because the tape will pick it up. If you spread negative energy, you can put that energy on the record. You may not know why you feel funny listening to it, but music is emotional. Balance & Options was a record I worked on fast. I mixed it on tape, then dumped it down and edited in the MP3 world. But overall, I didn’t want negative energy out there because it comes back. I hated the street element in the studio because the studio is almost clinical. It’s like a hospital. We’re there to put good music down, to affect people, lift people up, and make people feel good. That’s my philanthropy — I want people to whistle while they work. When certain artists would come in with new gang members they had just met, from different neighborhoods, I would ask, “Who is this guy? Is he armed?” Why are you bringing that energy in here? Bring a muse to the studio. Every time I looked up, it was a bunch of guys in the studio who didn’t belong there, changing the energy. They turned it into jail instead of a sacred place where we write songs. Trevor: I appreciate you, man. We could sit here for hours. What do you have coming up that you want to plug? DJ Quik: I’ve been a little sedentary, just playing with music, listening to stuff, and thinking of new ways to attack music. The newest way for me is to do it the original way — with tape. It’s my sound. One cool thing about pre-Pro Tools is that everybody sounded different. Every artist sounded different because of how they recorded, the engineers they used, and the equipment they used. Then Pro Tools came, and everybody started sounding identical. Everything comes into the same box, the same package, and you sound like you’re in that package. If I stay in Pro Tools, I can’t do anything different. Everybody sounds identical. Sometimes listening to the radio feels like one long song. No disrespect — that’s what some people want to do. They want to sound identical to someone else. But that doesn’t sit well with me. So I do it for the art. I don’t do it for the money anymore. I do it for the art, and whatever that gets me, I just have to be sincere and authentic to what I do. I’m back to tape, and I’m also in the copyright offices right now because my time has come for the reversion of my copyrights. I’ve been taking care of my business and getting certificates of recordation. Trevor: Most people never get to see that reversion period. That’s 30 years. Congratulations, man. DJ Quik: All my babies are coming home. Trevor: That’s beautiful. DJ Quik: Do you know this sound? Trevor: Yes, I do. Ladies and gentlemen, if you don’t know that sound, that is a tape machine button. For those who have never heard that foreign sound. Quik, thank you so much for pulling up and sharing all this information. It’s very inspiring. Ladies and gentlemen, one of the greatest to ever do it — DJ Quik. And I have to say this: DJ Quik was the first celebrity to ever rock a Drum Pimp T-shirt back in the day, so I’m giving you props for that. DJ Quik: Let’s share this too. I was the first hip-hop artist to be promoted with a billboard on Sunset. Trevor: That’s big too. DJ Quik: My debut single was nominated for an American Music Award right out of the box. Trevor: The man, the myth, the legend — DJ Quik. Thank you, brother. You blessed us, and I can’t thank you enough. DJ Quik: Thank you, my guy. Trevor: Thanks for watching The TrevBeats Show. I’m Trevor Lawrence Jr. We out.